Clinton, Obama spar over Reagan

Reagan wars flared at the Democratic presidential debate as Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) accused Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-Ill.) of lauding the iconic Republican president in a new best-seller.

Obama has been on the defensive over a favorable comment he made about President Ronald Reagan in an interview with the editorial board of the Las Vegas Review-Journal ahead of last weekend’s Nevada caucuses.

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At Monday night’s CNN debate in South Carolina, he turned the tables.

“The irony of this is that you provided much more fulsome praise of Ronald Reagan in a book by Tom Brokaw that's being published right now, ... as did Bill Clinton in the past,” Obama said. “So these are the kinds of political games that we are accustomed to.”

The charge came during a wild exchange during the beginning of the debate in which Clinton and Obama — standing at adjacent podium — interrupted and pointed angrily at each other.

Obama was referring to a passage in a New York Times best-seller by former NBC anchor Tom Brokaw called “Boom! Voices of the Sixties: Personal Recollections on the ‘60s and Today”

Brokaw writes that Clinton “believes that modern conservatives such as Karl Rove are ‘obsessed’ with defeating her.”

“She prefers the godfather of the modern conservative movement, Ronald Reagan,” Brokaw writes on Page 404. “He was, she says, 'a child of the Depression, so he understood it [economic pressures on the working and middle class]. When he had those big tax cuts and they went too far, he oversaw the largest tax increase. He could call the Soviet Union the Evil Empire and then negotiate arms-control agreements. He played the balance and the music beautifully.

“In 1969, who would have imagined that the Hillary Rodham on the Wellesley commencement stage would find herself 38 years later paying tribute to Ronald Reagan?"

The brackets are Brokaw’s. The passage contrasts remarks Clinton made in comments to Brokaw employing what he calls the “'60s rhetoric” she used as the student commencement speaker at Wellesley College in 1969, when she was an honors graduate in political science.

Both Clinton and her husband have taken Obama to task for telling the Reno (Nevada) Gazette-Journal: “Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that, you know, Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it. He tapped into what people were already feeling, which is we want clarity, we want optimism, we want, you know, a return to that sense of dynamism and, you know, entrepreneurship that had been missing.”